Sri Lankan student in Johns Hopkins’ cancer breakthrough

"There's a risk that something that looks so great in an animal model won't pan out in a human," he said.

But Maitra said the study looked promising, in particular because the researchers had used drugs already on the market. It can take a decade to identify a drug that would perform similarly and get it approved, and many similar observations don't advance because of the time and expense it can take to get drug approval, he said.

Muhammad Zaman, a professor and cancer expert at Boston University, called the Hopkins discovery "exciting."

"This paper gives you a very specific target to design drugs against," he said. "That's really quite spectacular from the point of view of drug design and creating therapies."

Zaman said it was important for cancer researchers to use engineering to better understand cancer, as the Hopkins team did.

"This really brings cancer and engineering together in a very unique way, and it really takes an approach that is quantitative and rigorous," he said. "We have to think of cancer as a complex system, not just a disease."

Wirtz predicted a future where cancer would be fought with a mix of chemotherapy to shrink the primary tumour and drug cocktails like the one the Hopkins team developed to ensure it would not metastasise. He compared such a treatment to how HIV/AIDS is treated today.

"We're not going to cure cancer with one therapy or even two therapies; it's going to be drug cocktails," Wirtz said. "That's what saved the day with HIV/AIDS."

Immunotherapy, which uses the body's immune system to fight cancer, also could play a role in a combined method, Wirtz added.

"We're, in research, sometimes incentivized to look at one pathway at a time, one type of cancer at a time," Wirtz said. "I think oncology has started realizing we're going to need more than one approach."